“I thought so,” he said.  “Well, that is why I did it.”

“I see.  I wanted to know the truth; and now I know it.”

“You don’t know half of it—­” His passion leapt to his tongue under the torture, but he held it down.  He paused, knowing that this moment in which he stood was one of those moments which have the spirit and the power of eternity, and that it was his to save or to destroy it.  So admirable indeed was his control that it had taken their own significance from his words, and she read into them another meaning.  Her face was white with terror because of the thing she had said; but she still looked at him without flinching.  She hardly realized that he was going, that he was trying to say good-bye.

“I will take the books—­if you can keep them for me a little while.”

Some perfect instinct told her that this was the only way of atonement for her error.  He thanked her as if they had been speaking of a trifling thing.

She rose, holding the manuscript loosely in her clasped hands, and he half thought that she was going to give it back to him.  He took it from her and threw it on the window-seat, and held her hands together for an instant in his own.  He looked down at them, longing to stoop and kiss them, but forebore, because of his great love for her, and let them go.  He went out quickly.  He had sufficient self-command to find Kitty and thank her and take his leave.

As the door closed on him Lucia heard herself calling him back, with what intention she hardly knew, unless it were to return his poems.  “Keith,” she said softly—­“Keith.”  But even to her own senses it was less a name than a sound that began in a sob and ended in a sigh.

Kitty found her standing in the window-place where he had left her.  “Has anything happened?” she asked.

“I asked him to marry me, Kitty, and he wouldn’t.  That was all.”

“Are you sure you did, dear?  From the look of him I should have said it was the other way about.”

CHAPTER LXXV

“I don’t know what to think of it, Kitty.  What do you think?”

“I think you’ve been playing with fire, dear.  With the divine fire.  It’s the most dangerous of all, and you’ve got your little fingers burnt.”

“Like Horace.  He once said the burnt critic dreads the divine fire.  I’m not a critic.”

“That you most certainly are not.”

“Still I used to understand him; and now I can’t.  I can’t make it out at all.”

“There’s only one thing,” said Kitty, musing till an inspiration came.  “You haven’t seen him for more than three years, and you can’t tell what may have happened in between.  He may have got entangled with another woman.”

Kitty would not have hazarded this conjecture if she had not believed it plausible.  But she dwelt on it with a beneficent intention.  No other theory, she opined, would so effectually turn and rout the invading idea of Keith Rickman.